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8. "The Congress"

Director: Ari FolmanCast: Robin Wright, Paul Giamatti, Harvey Keitel

First, the bad news: despite what the image to your immediate left may suggest, Israeli director Folman has not followed up his Oscar-nominated quasi-documentary "Waltz With Bashir" with a high-gloss biopic of esteemed recording artist Ke$ha. Still, "The Congress" is very nearly as unpredictable a left turn. An adaptation of a sci-fi short story by Stanislaw Lem ("Solaris"), it stars Robin Wright as a desperate actress who agrees to a studio's radical new scheme: scanning her entire image, to be inserted in any future film without her physical participation. The film meshes live action with the same stylized animation technique employed in "Bashir." I'll level with you: while I thought Folman's previous film was more an intriguing experiment than a fully dimensional work, his approach seems ideally suited to this material. Could be something that captures the imagination of jury president Steven Spielberg, too.